to place the Secretary in a position where he could not dominate or seriously influence Congress.

Another provision of the law of 1789 was that the report of the Secretary of the Treasury could be made either in person or in writing. In 1790, however, when the time arrived for Hamilton to report on funding the national debt, the House decided that the report should be made in writing.10 Thus the custom was established. The annual report of the Secretary of the Treasury was made permanent by law in 1800, with specific provision that it was "for the information of Congress."

In the beginning Congressional procedure conformed in many ways to English precedents. Revenue and appropriation measures were considered, as at the present time, in committee of the whole, but with no standing committees intervening between the recommendations of the departments and the action of the House. In 1796, however, a commitee on ways and means was appointed for the purpose of considering financial measures, and in 1802 this committee was made a permanent standing committee. It continued to have control of both revenue and appropriation bills down to 1865, when a committee on appropriations was created, the idea being to promote economy and efficiency. In 1883 the committee on rivers and harbors was created, and in 1885, owing to a fight between the chairman of the committee on appropriations and the leaders of his party, the committee on appropriations was deprived of much of its power and the work of preparing appropriation bills divided among six different committees. Thus the progress toward diffusion of legislative responsibility became complete.

Under the congressional procedure each department is required by law to submit to the Secretary of the Treasury, not later than October 15, estimates of needs for the coming fiscal year. These estimates are compiled and submitted to Congress in the form of the annual report of the Secretary of the Treasury, a volume of some seven or eight hundred pages, merely thrown together, without adequate analysis, without cross references, without even so much as an index. The Secretary's function is purely clerical. He has been

10 Dewey, op. cit. p. 86.

called the "funnel" through which the estimates pass on their way to Congress.

Again, when the report reaches Congress there is no committee to digest and correlate. The Speaker merely breaks it up and refers the fragments to the proper committees, eight in all, along with the task of raising revenue to the Committee on Ways and Means.

In addition to this, there are pouring into Congress all during the session estimates from additional and totally independent sources: judgments of the Court of Claims, engineering estimates from the War Department, special bills of all kinds, and supplemental estimates of all sorts and sizes. In the documents of the 60th Congress may be found a supplemental estimate of $3.50 for one bicycle tire.11 And in it all there is no committtee to correlate these proposals or to defend them before the House as a whole. Each department clamors for all it can get. Each committee clamors for all it can get. Each individual naturally clamors for all he can get.

The foregoing applies only to financial legislation. When we remember that bills for other purposes are pouring in from other sources in an equally disconnected and unsystematic fashion, the term "congressional mill" takes on a new meaning. Fifty years has been called a conservative estimate of the time it would take to consider thoroughly all the bills submitted to Congress at a single session. It was this condition of affairs, perhaps, that led James Russell Lowell once to remark that we have in the United States "government by declamation" instead of government by deliberation.

The procedure from here on is very familiar: the threshing out in committees; the committee reports; the wide powers of amendment; the combinations among members; the tacking on of riders; and the powerlessness of the President to influence financial measures except through indirect and coercive methods. The procedure in the Senate is similar, and in the conferences which follow on amended bills the voice of the Senate nearly always prevails.

The defects of such a system are not hard to summarize: 1. It is unbusinesslike and encourages extravagance. 2. No

"Ford, The Cost of Our National Government, p. 16.

one is given constitutional control over the estimates. The estimates merely pour in as a great stream of disconnected and often conflicting requests for money. 3. The system provides no way by which the public may fix responsibility. From a constitutional standpoint, the estimates come from various "irresponsible" sources. "Irresponsible" committees prepare and submit plans for raising and spending money. The individual member is responsible only to his constituents, whose chief interest frequently centers around the ability of their Congressman, in the popular phrase, "to bring home the bacon." 4. Members of Congress vote on appropriation bills without opportunity to ask questions of the executive heads. Similarly the executive heads have no real opportunity to defend their proposals publicly, or to oppose those that have been worked out in the seclusion of committtee rooms. 5. The system affords unlimited and irresistible temptation to "log-rolling" and to the tacking on of irrelevant riders having nothing in common, as Henry C. Adams says, but the common desire to be legalized. 6. Great revenues and appropriation measures are prepared without definite plan or expert supervision and are frequently patched up further from the floor, the result often being a sort of legislative "crazy quilt" which defies analysis or comprehension. 7. The president, representing the national point of view, has no real power to influence a bill while it is in a plastic state or to get at the irrelevant portions of a bill, however irrelevant they may be.

The American states follow in the main the trail blazed by Congress. There are certain very important differences, to be sure, but the general results are the same: no expert supervision, no intelligible classification, no concerted policy, no fixed responsibility; the same log-rolling methods, the same multitude of bills, the same patchwork of legislation, and often appropriation measures carrying millions of dollars "jammed through" in the closing hours of the session.

In most states this condition of affairs has continued for years. In the meantime many of our political leaders have appeared oblivious of the weaknesses and real needs of the situation or else insistently jealous of what has euphemistically

been called legislative supremacy in matters of financial administration.

From all that has just been said, it would seem that a very easy solution of the problem could be found in the introduction of the British budget system. But the problem is capable of no such simple and off-hand treatment. Constitutional systems develop very gradually. They cannot be made out of hand or changed over night by the stroke of a pen.

The first thing to be realized, in the opinion of the present writer, is that the American constitutional system is neither inherently bad, nor is it the most perfect system that could be devised. Our constitutional system has, roughly, achieved its purpose, and perhaps has achieved it better than any other system would have done. In its financial procedure, however, has arisen one of the hitches, one of the crotchets, so to speak, of American democracy; one of the numerous places where theory does not "square" with practice.

Theoretically, the democratic thing to do is to allow appropriation measures to be introduced or amended at will. Practically, the result has proved just the opposite from what was originally intended. The moment such a measure comes before a legislative body for consideration, the latter loses its character as a single body working for the interests of the state or country as a whole and becomes a collection of individuals, each working for his district, or his constituents, or himself, and losing the state or national point of view. The fault is with the system and not wholly or in large part with the men composing the system.

There are many signs of a growing recognition of these facts. Along with the "commission idea", indeed as a part of the same general movement, the budget idea has taken hold of the American mind. Reference was made in the beginning to the movement for the budget in the American states and municipalities. There has been a similar movement in Congress, though its progress is discouragingly slow. An amendment to the federal Sundry Civil Service Bill of 1909 gave the President and the Secretary of the Treasury at least a modicum of control over estimates of expenditures and revenues. In 1912 the word "budget" appeared for the first time in the plat

forms of the national political parties. Moreover, President Taft, following a report of his Commission on Economy and Efficiency, on Feb. 26, 1913, submitted to Congress a budget together with special message claiming the constitutional right to submit a definite plan and to become definitely responsible-a proposal which Congress resented and refused to consider. Only a few months ago a resolution was introduced in the Senate, which, if adopted, would commit the federal government to a definite budgetary procedure.

Of the numerous remedies that have been proposed for the present situation, the great majority may be dismissed as involving too complete a change in our political institutions. For the purposes of this discussion, the remedies may be divided into two general classes: the ideal and practical, what they ought to be and what they probably will be for the present time.

The first of these is the plan of executive responsibility, the idea being that the executive is naturally the leader of his party program and represents at least as much responsibility as can be secured under our system. This plan involves, among other things: 1. The preparation of all financial plans. in advance by the executive assisted by a body of experts, and the submission of these plans by him to the legislature. 2. Making the executive responsive to the people by conditioning his progress upon the approval or disapproval of a majority of the legislature. 3. Making the legislative body responsive to the people by limiting its powers to review and approval or rejection, and then in case of serious differences, referring the issue directly to the people.12 This plan contains the essence of the British budget system. It is the closest approach to popular control that can be attained under representative government. The constitutional difficulties are evident, so far as the United States is concerned, but they are not insuperable.

Actual budgetary reform in the United States is proceeding along two main lines, one being a modification of this executive budget and the other being the so-called legislative budget. The former amounts in many cases to little more than an executive recommendation. It is important, however,

12 Cf. F. A. Cleveland in The New Republic, Vol. VII, No. 90, p. 294.